Russian drone strike kills two at Ukraine's Academy of Sciences in Kyiv barrage

A Russian jet-powered drone slammed into the 19th-century headquarters of Ukraine's National Academy of Sciences in central Kyiv on Monday afternoon, killing two women who worked inside the building and injuring the academy's own vice president as part of a nationwide barrage that left at least nine people dead and more than 80 wounded across the country.

Video captured by bystanders showed the drone approaching in a steep, near-vertical dive before slamming into the presidium building on Volodymyrska Street and exploding, sending a plume of smoke over the historic city center. The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the country's main state-funded body for coordinating scientific research, occupies a mansion built in the 1850s for Countess Levashova that has housed the academy's leadership since 1919. Emergency crews spent the afternoon and evening pulling people from windows and clearing rubble on the building's upper floors.

The toll rises through the day

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said late Monday that two people had been killed in the capital and at least 26 injured, including three children, as Russian drones also struck a pharmaceutical plant, petrol stations, data centers and a medical education complex across several districts. One of the dead at the academy was Natalia Bukalo, personal assistant to Volodymyr Horbulin, the academy's vice president and a former secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council; Horbulin himself suffered minor cuts from shattered glass when the strike hit the floor above his office, according to Ukrainian news agency UNN. A second victim's body was recovered from the debris later in the rescue operation.

Nationwide, Al Jazeera reported that the death toll from Monday's attacks climbed to at least nine as figures were confirmed overnight, with more than 80 people wounded. Three people were killed and 19 wounded when a business center was hit in Dnipro; one person died in a strike on a logistics office in Synelnykove; and 32 people were wounded in an attack on infrastructure in Zaporizhzhia. CBS News reported that Russia launched 120 drones on Monday, 90 of them jet-powered models that Ukraine's military says it is struggling to intercept; President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the overall interception rate stood at 70 percent but fell to 57 percent for the jet-powered drones specifically.

An intensifying campaign

The strike lands amid what United Nations monitors describe as the heaviest bombardment of Kyiv since Russia's full-scale invasion began four and a half years ago. A UN News brief tracking the broader pattern of September strikes found that Kyiv recorded civilian casualties on 16 of the month's first 24 days — the highest monthly frequency of the war — with at least 200 civilians killed and 1,234 injured across the country between September 1 and 24 alone, a toll UN monitors expect to rise as verification continues. Russia has escalated its use of jet-powered attack drones, a faster and more maneuverable variant of the propeller-driven Shahed-type munitions it has relied on since 2022, which Ukrainian air defenses have found markedly harder to bring down. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday that "Ukraine will have to pay a price for the actions that have taken place in recent months," an apparent reference to Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries and energy infrastructure that have continued despite pressure from Washington to scale them back.

A blow to Ukraine's scientific establishment

The academy, founded in 1918 with geochemist Volodymyr Vernadsky as its first president, coordinates dozens of research institutes across Ukraine and is one of the country's oldest state institutions to survive intact from before Soviet rule. Ukraine's National Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, a state body that oversees standards at universities and research institutions, condemned the attack as a strike on the foundations of the country's higher education and research system. Ukraine's National Commission for UNESCO separately called on the organization to strip Russia of its voting rights over the strike, and the German ambassador to Kyiv, whose embassy sits near the academy, said the mission's own work and support for Ukraine would continue uninterrupted.

Former armed forces commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, now Ukraine's ambassador to the United Kingdom, said the academy building had been a "second workplace" for him throughout his time as commander-in-chief, when he regularly consulted its scientists on military technology. Speaking to Interfax-Ukraine, he said several people he knew personally were among the casualties.

"We cannot bring back those who died. And, of course, we will never forgive the one responsible," Zaluzhnyi said.

What comes next

Zelenskyy said Ukraine would respond to the strike and called on allies to treat continued support as inseparable from the principle that "terror must never be normalized, anywhere." He said new interceptor systems aimed at the jet-powered drones are being tested but need further refinement before they can meaningfully close the gap in Ukraine's air defenses. The attack comes as Kyiv and Washington remain at odds over the pace of Ukraine's own strikes on Russian oil infrastructure, with Trump administration officials pressing Zelenskyy to ease them even as Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities continue unabated. Rebuilding work at the academy is expected to take months given the extent of fire damage to its upper floors, and officials have not said whether any archives or research materials were destroyed. Klitschko's administration said cleanup and structural assessment of the building would begin this week, while the capital's air raid sirens sounded again within hours of Monday's barrage as officials warned residents to expect further strikes in the coming days.